Ecstatic Terror

Wonderful news. What bliss to be alive and watch the Genocide Party die. Bravo Hannah.

Tariq Ali, what is your attitude when dictators are toppled  in Iraq, Libya and now Syria? There is no cause for celebration when these acts are carried out by Western imperialisms under the leadership of the United States.When they are toppled by their own people I celebrate. The West removes the people it doesn't like at a particular moment. Saddam of Iraq was a hero when he acted for the US and started a war with Iran. He became a 'Hitler' only when he invaded Kuwait imagining he had a green light from the US. Then after 9/11 they finished off him and a million other Iraqis. Five million orphans. Then they lynched Saddam,. Cause for celebration? I wrote against him produced a documentary mocking him when he was alive. In Libya NATO killed over 30,000 Libyans to push through regime change and lynch Ghaddafi. 'We came, we saw, he died' was Hilary Clinton's celebration. French and British politicians took money from him. The LSE  begged for a big donation and its professors wrote young Ghaddafi's PhD for him. Lord Giddens compared his work to Tony Blair's own great ideas. The same people supported NATO's assault. I criticised him severely for many years.  I did not celebrate his death. What is there to celebrate in the antics of Western imperialism. The same for Syria where an internal Ba'ath coup toppled Assed and they're stitching up a deal with the US and Turkey. Iraq has not yet recovered. Libya is a wreck, ruled by rival jihadis. Syria has already been divided. The huge triumph of the West in the 90's is still playing itself out. They are no longer ashamed of displaying their double standards as we observe in the Israeli genocide in Palestine, but NATO's useful idiots in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, adornments of the bourgeois media and their supporters in the barely existent left, still pretend that advances are being made. In one of his remarks on theatre, Brech stressed that he preferred to start withe new bad things not the old good ones. There are no longer any good ones left. Centuries before him, Spinoza who has just had his sentence of expulsion rescinded by the Synagogue in Amsterdam offered his own advice: 'Neither to laugh nor to cry but to understand'. NATO liberals should reflect on it.